The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women's Unruly Political Bodies

by Andrea Elizabeth Shaw

Overview

Despite the West's privileging of slenderness as an aesthetic ideal, the African Diaspora has historically displayed a resistance to the Western European and North American indulgence in 'fat anxiety.' The Embodiment of Disobedience explores the ways in which the African Diaspora has rejected the West's efforts to impose imperatives of slenderness and mass market fat-anxiety. Author Andrea Shaw explores the origins and contradictions of this phenomenon, especially the cultural deviations in beauty criteria and the related social and cultural practices. Unique in its examination of how both fatness and blackness interact on literary cultural planes, this book also offers a diasporic scope that develops previously unexamined connections among female representations throughout the African Diaspora.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780739154571
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	07/27/2006
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	162
File size:	584 KB

About the Author

Andrea Elizabeth Shaw is Assistant Director of the Division of Humanities and Assistant Professor of English at Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction: Fatness and Blackness: A Compelling Coincidence of Erasure
Chapter 2 Reshaping Identity
Chapter 3 The Anatomy of Sexual Unruliness
Chapter 4 Bodily Abundance
Chapter 5 Spectacles of Size: The Performing Bodies of Fat Black Women
Chapter 6 Consumption and Control: The Epidemic of Fatness